As the world fixates on Hamas, who will disarm the Israeli settlers storming West Bank villages?
Israeli soldiers stand by the entrance of a Palestinian house besieged by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank village of Qusra on 14 August 2026
Soumaya Ghannoushi writes in Middle East Eye on 18 August 2026:
In Qusra, in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian families have spent August imprisoned inside their own homes. Israeli settlers pitched tents in their yards and cut them off from the outside world. Water and electricity were severed. Food ran short.
Armed men gathered outside, smashed windows, threw stones, and stole appliances. Inside, parents tried to calm frightened children, never knowing whether the next sound at the door would be the start of another attack.
In one home, Qusai Abu Rida was trapped with his teenage son. Thousands of miles away in Ohio, his brother Loai watched through security cameras as settlers surrounded the house – until Israeli soldiers removed the camera. Nearby, Ruqaya Hassan endured the siege with her children, among them four-year-old Kinda, who she said were living in fear.
Elsewhere in Qusra, Marmar Ouda has effectively turned his home into a cage to protect his family. Metal fencing surrounds the house, and bars cover the windows. Nearby, someone spray-painted in Hebrew: “Death to Arabs.” Five months earlier, Ouda says a settler shot dead his nephew and wounded his brother in front of him. He complained to Israeli police, but the attacks continued.
This is Qusra in August 2026 – and the village is not an aberration. It is a window onto what is being unleashed across the occupied West Bank.
Escalating violence
Across the territory, Palestinian communities are being subjected to a campaign of violence whose vocabulary has become horribly familiar. Homes attacked. Cars torched. Sheep stolen. Farmers beaten. People shot. Water seized. Olive trees uprooted and burned. Families driven from communities where they have lived for generations.
The pattern repeats from village to village. A settler outpost appears. Palestinians discover that grazing land used for decades is suddenly inaccessible. Roads are blocked, shepherds are harassed, livestock disappears, and homes are raided. As such violence becomes routine, the Israeli army does not protect Palestinians. In documented cases, soldiers have accompanied and assisted the attackers.
Human Rights Watch warned in July that escalating settler violence threatened mass atrocities. The previous month, Amnesty International published an extensive investigation describing the forcible displacement of Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank as ethnic cleansing.
Israeli human-rights organisation B’Tselem puts the relationship between settlers and the state more starkly: “Settler Violence = State Violence.”
On 6 June, according to B’Tselem, dozens of armed settlers raided four Palestinian villages south of Nablus. At least eight Palestinians were injured. Twenty-year-old Omar Abd al-Hakim Dar Muhammad was hospitalised in intensive care with a brain haemorrhage and severe facial fractures.
The attackers stole at least 44 sheep, a donkey, three vehicles and equipment. They vandalised other vehicles and attempted to burn a local council building. At least one soldier accompanied them.
Permanent danger
In Khirbet Susiya in February, around 20 settlers armed with clubs and flammable materials descended on the village at night, attacking homes and cars, and setting tents, chicken coops and vehicles ablaze.